Slowly she began to calm down. Far off I heard another blast, and booted footsteps resounding through the maze, but I didn"t care about all that right now. I know this is a strange thing to say, but I"d never felt closer to Maggie than I did at that moment.
I found myself leaning forward and kissing those swollen, sagging lips. It was the most repulsive thing I had ever done, yet it was the most wonderful. When I looked at her again, she"d stopped crying. She was still the same mess she"d been a moment before. I mean, it wasn"t like the kiss had changed her from a frog into a princess, but something had changed in both of us in that weird little moment.
"I"ll fix everything," I told her, promised her, swore to her. There was a way out of every ride. Ca.s.sandra had said so herself. Not just for me, but for Maggie, too. And maybe . . . maybe even for Quinn.
"Listen," I told her, "this path was a dead end, but the next one might not be. We"ll go together." I took her misshapen hand and held it tight. "I won"t let you go." But she was not quite ready to believe me.
"I hate myself," she said, not wanting to look me in the eye. "I always have."
And maybe from somewhere deep down, she was telling the truth. I mean, I know I"ve hated myself from time to time. But the thing is, that feeling comes and it goes. Mostly it goes. But I figured Maggie had fallen through one of the distorting mirrors that took that tiny little feeling and made it so big that it buried everything else under it.
"Russ was right to run from me."
She must have fallen through the feel-sorry-for-yourself mirror, too. This situation was getting much too serious, so I looked at her stretched jaw. "C"mon, Maggie, why the long face?"
"Ha-ha." She hit me on the arm, but I just smiled back. I can"t quite say I grew used to the distorted image she"d made of herself, but I"d stretched my own mind enough to accept it.
"Stop looking at me!" she said, hiding her face. "I"m terrible. I"m so ugly!"
And then I got an idea. It was either a really great idea or a really bad one, but I was willing to take my chances. I smiled at her. "You can say that again!"
She looked at me, uncertainly. "What?"
"You"re not just b.u.t.t ugly," I continued, "and you"re not just coyote ugly-you"re coyote b.u.t.t ugly."
"Shut up!"
"You"re so ugly, your driver"s license doesn"t have a picture. Instead, it just says, "You don"t wanna know.""
"Stop it!" she yelled, but now she was laughing.
"You"re so ugly that . . . you"re so ugly that..." But I was fresh out of lame ugly jokes.
So she came up with one: "I"m so ugly, my face is registered as a lethal weapon."
I laughed, she laughed, and before long we were both caught up in one of those silly giggle fits where you can"t even catch your breath. And it was great, because suddenly it didn"t matter what she looked like. I could see grat.i.tude in those mismatched eyes, and they were the same shade of green they"d always been. I could still see the girl I knew.
We wound around deeper into the maze, encountering dead end after dead end. I tried to keep track of every turn we took, but it was just too much. Every once in a while we encountered other mutated riders. Some were furious and waved their arms at us angrily. Others were terrified and ran away. Still others just sat there morosely, like orangutans at the zoo, resigned to their condition.
"If I can just figure out the combination of mirrors you pa.s.sed through," I said to Maggie, "we could get you back to normal."
"I tried," she said. "I tried too many. I kept turning right, then left. Didn"t do any good. Each one was worse."
And then something occurred to me. None of these mirrors were solid-not a single one-which meant that the mirrors weren"t actually holding us in.
There were no walls holding us in!
I turned to face the mirror beside me. Could it be that easy? Of course it could. What better joke for Ca.s.sandra to pull than to make the answer so obvious, you looked right past it? You walked around it, changing direction again and again and again.
I looked at my reflection. One shoulder higher than the other, a nasty curved spine. I took a step toward the mirror, and Maggie squeezed my hand hard.
"No! Don"t!"
"Trust me," I told her. There was no reason she should; I knew no more than she did. But she took a deep breath, and together we stepped forward, through the mirror.
I felt the change like an electric shock as I merged with my reflection, becoming what I saw. I could feel the distortion inside me-the sickening swelling of organs and the shifting of bones-but I refused to panic. I held tightly to Maggie"s hand. I didn"t turn around, I didn"t turn left or right, getting confused as to which direction I started out in. Instead I stepped forward again into the next mirror. This was a really bad one, altering the way I felt about myself. I"m wrong! I"m always wrong! I can"t make a good decision! I felt the mirror turning me uncertain and indecisive, making me feel that no matter what I did next, I was doomed, doomed, doomed.
Maggie felt it too. I heard her moaning and trying to loosen her grip on my hand, not trusting me, not trusting herself. If I gave in to those feelings, we truly would be doomed, so I fought my own mind and made my feet move, stepping forward again through the next mirror, and the next, and the next, always moving forward. My stride became a limping lope; my eyesight turned cloudy and full of double images as my eyes changed sizes.
Through it all, Maggie held my hand. At the times when I came to mirrors that slowed me down because of what they made me feel, that was when she took the lead, pulling me on, even when I didn"t have the strength to move forward.
There came a point when my body had become so unnaturally bent and convoluted that moving forward was next to impossible. One foot dragged, the other moved sideways. My whole body ached and strained against itself as if, at any moment, my joints would give way and I would collapse into a blubbery mess on the bone-ridden ground. My own frame looked as bad as these bones did, and I wondered whether they were actually the bones of other unfortunate riders or whether they were just put here to force everyone trapped in the maze to give up hope. We must have pa.s.sed through twenty mirrors. I began to worry that maybe my theory was wrong.
I stumbled, and Maggie helped me up. I felt my face and turned to her. She didn"t look much worse than she had when I first found her, but then, she couldn"t look much worse than she already had.
"Now we"re the same," I told her. My voice was so distorted, I could barely make out my own words.
She touched my face, which was numb and rubbery. "We always were," she said.
Do you know what it"s like to be turned inside out in every way you can be and have the worst parts of yourself exposed to anyone who happens to be looking? Maybe you do-after all, it happens to us a little bit all the time. I guess lots of people would look at you and run, like Russ. But to have someone who won"t run-someone who won"t use your shame against you-that takes someone special. Having that person with you in the worst part of the maze makes all the difference.
I honestly don"t know if I could have made it any farther on my own, but Maggie was there, and it was all right. We were the same.
I took her hand again and kept going. If moving through the mirrors was a mistake, I didn"t care. I was going all the way, until there was nothing left of me. We pushed through five more mirrors. Ten. Twenty. Then finally the reflections started to get just a little bit better. The feelings I had inside began to lighten just the slightest bit.
A few mirrors more, and my eyes went back to normal, the twist in my spine was almost gone, and my arms were just about the same length. I was almost myself, and when I looked to Maggie, she was almost herself again too.
Finally we stood at the last mirror. I knew it was the last mirror because the reflection it gave back was perfect. Well, maybe not perfect, but me, in all my imperfections. As I stood there I felt the urge to look anywhere but straight ahead, as if the mirrors on either side of me were daring me to take a final glance. I resisted. I forced myself to take that giant step through the last mirror, to find myself facing a pea green sky and an endless salt flat.
"We made it!" I shouted. "We"re out!"
. . . But somewhere along the way, as we were pa.s.sing through those last few mirrors, I"d let go of Maggie"s hand. When I looked beside me, Maggie wasn"t there. I turned around and saw her standing just on the other side of the final mirror. It was one-way. She couldn"t see me, but I could see her.
"Maggie, come on! Step through!" She couldn"t hear me, either, so I reached out-and b.u.mped against gla.s.s. From my side, the mirror was solid.
"Blake?" she called. "Blake . . . where are you?"
"Maggie!" I screamed, and I pounded on the gla.s.s, but she couldn"t see, she couldn"t hear!
"Blake?"
And then she turned.
I don"t know what she saw in the mirror beside her, but whatever it was, it must have been horrible. It must have been the worst mirror of all, because it undid her. She put her hand over her mouth and let loose a wail so full of despair, it could blacken the sun.
"Turn around!" I yelled at her. "Look forward. Just one more step-just one more!"
But she couldn"t hear me. I pounded on the gla.s.s again and again, but nothing helped. She was locked on whatever she was seeing.
She stumbled back and fell through another mirror. I watched, powerless, as she looked around, trying to remember from which way she had come. She was sobbing now. Sorrow, fear, all her worst emotions were amplified, stretching her face again as she stumbled in one direction and then another and another.
"Maggie!"
I kept my eyes locked on her, pounding on the gla.s.s as she ran in a panic in every direction, pa.s.sing through mirror after mirror, becoming more and more distorted and disoriented, her screams changing until they weren"t even human. Then she was gone, so lost in the maze that I couldn"t see her anymore.
"Nooo!" I beat the gla.s.s again with all my might. I wanted the gla.s.s to shatter-I wanted the whole cathedral to explode-but the gla.s.s held. I slid to the ground, and for the first time since arriving in this terrible place, I cried. I bawled like a baby. It was all my fault! I"d let her go. I"d stepped out before she had, and now she was lost and alone. I"d left her. Despite all my promises, I"d left her. Suddenly I felt the way I did all those years ago, when I had pounded against the emergency exit door at the back of the bus, unable to open it.
To be completely helpless in the face of life-powerless to do a single thing-that"s what I"d always feared more than anything. It was like I"d been keeping all the edges of my life neat and clean, pretending the neatness was all that mattered, pretending life could somehow be controlled.
For a moment I felt like giving up. I closed my eyes. No. I would not give in. If it was my fate to keep smashing my fist against emergency exit doors, then that"s what I would do. Even if I saved no one. Even if I died doing it, this place would not beat me.
I opened my eyes. There before me on the barren salt plain was a turnstile in front of a freestanding stone arch. My failure to bring Maggie out of the maze weighed on me like an anchor, but I buried my feelings of loss, of inadequacy, and of failure. Those mirrors were behind me now. My path was forward. It had to be. Four rides down. I was more than halfway to seven. I put one foot in front of the other, forcing myself to move on, refusing to look back.
As I walked away from the distortions of the mirrored cathedral, the symbol on the back of my hand glowed blinding white, and for the first time I felt excitement instead of just dread. I was not going to be a victim; I was a challenger, just as Ca.s.sandra had said. I was going to be the best challenger this place had ever known.
I ran my hand over the scanner and pushed through the turnstile. I was no longer on the salt flat but was winding through an empty line, toward the ride ahead. I heard the ride before I saw it-an awful metallic click-click-click of a chain. I knew that sound. Oh, did I know that sound.
The next ride was a roller coaster. And it was called the Kamikaze.
9.
Zero Tolerance The coaster looked like a replica of the Kamikaze roller coaster I rode last night, back in the amus.e.m.e.nt park where people didn"t get killed-or, at least, didn"t get killed on purpose. There were two major differences to this coaster, however. First, there was only one seat in each row, not two. n.o.body rode with a partner. On this Kamikaze everyone rode alone. Second, the steep climb didn"t stop where it was supposed to; it just kept going up into a bright blue sky speckled with clouds. I looked at my watch again: 4:15. Still long before dawn in the real world.
As with all the other rides, there were a dozen or so kids weaving through the maze of the line. They didn"t see each other, didn"t see anything but the ride. It filled their minds and spirits. They were already owned by this place and didn"t know it.
By the time I reached the front, the train was full. The ride operator was standing in front of a huge lever that grew from the ground. He had a sick leer on his face, like he"d just done something he wouldn"t tell his momma about. He also had only one arm-his left one-which was strong and muscular, I a.s.sume from working this lever since the beginning of time.
"Room up front," he said to me, and let out a noise that was something between a giggle and sucking up snot.
I took another look at the train. Like I said, it was completely full.
"Sorry, Lefty. Guess I"ll have to ride the next one."
The guy looked at the kid sitting in the first car and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. With a single tug, he launched the kid skyward. I never actually saw that kid come down.
"Room up front," Lefty said again, and smiled that I-got-bodies-in-my-freezer kind of smile.
"Yeah. Funny I didn"t notice it before," I said, and took my place. Okay, I"m ready for this, I told myself, as if thinking it would make it so. Just a few minutes ago I was full of p.i.s.s and vinegar, as my mom would say. But now I was just about ready to let loose some of the first ingredient in my jeans. Did it have to be a roller coaster?
I pulled down the safety bar, but it kept popping right back up.
"Hey, wait a second!"
Too late. Lefty grabbed the huge lever, hauled on it, and away we rolled, cranking up the insanely steep climb toward a windswept sky.
It took at least ten minutes to reach the top. My hands were freezing as I tugged on that stupid lap bar, which still refused to stay down. The peak rose above the clouds, and beneath it a ma.s.sive lattice of wood dropped out of sight to the ground, which looked like it was a mile or two below us. In the world I came from, no one could build a structure like that, but here in Ca.s.sandra"s worlds there were all sorts of mystical feats of engineering.
My heart sped up, aching in my chest. What would the ride become once it began its first drop? Maybe it"s just a roller coaster, I tried to tell myself. A really BIG roller coaster.
As we reached the peak I turned to see the kids behind me putting their hands up in the air. That"s when I noticed the clouds below weren"t just random shapes. There were faces in them.
The drop came into view as we crested the peak. And then the train began its fall.
My teeth rattled in my skull, and my brain felt like it would come loose in my head. We were not just being pulled by gravity, we were accelerating faster than gravity could possibly pull us. I felt the skin on my face stretched by g-forces as we dove into the clouds. And then things began to change. The ride began to take on its true form.
The little s.p.a.ce for my legs stretched as it had in the b.u.mper cars, but the dashboard in front of me didn"t expand into the dashboard of a car. It became an instrument panel with dozens of k.n.o.bs, b.u.t.tons, and screens. A gla.s.s canopy grew over me, sealing me in, and the clatter of the track changed pitch, becoming the whine of an engine.
A stick with two handles grew from the floorboard, and when I looked to the side, I could see wings stretching out from under me: wings with a bright red spot painted on each one.
This was a plane, and I was flying it.
I tried to crane my head around to see the kids behind me, and I saw enough to know that the train had broken apart into twelve separate c.o.c.kpits. I was alone in my own propeller aircraft-the first in a line of a dozen planes plunging down through the clouds.
I flashed on an image of my American Airlines ticket to New York tucked so peacefully away in my desk drawer back home. All of a sudden an airline meal and an in-flight movie didn"t sound so bad.
Okay . . . okay, I told myself, trying to rein in my panic. So I"m flying a plane. I can do this. So what if I"ve never flown a plane before? So what if hundreds of people die every year in air disasters? I can figure this out, right? I can read all the markings on the instruments and figure out what they all do, right?
Well, maybe not. Because everything was labeled in j.a.panese.
That"s when it occurred to me exactly what kind of plane had big red spots painted on the wings. And why the ride was called the Kamikaze.
I"ve got a j.a.panese Zero in my room-or at least a model of one, perfectly glued and painted. Just like the real thing, with one big exception: The Zero in my bedroom wasn"t about to kill me.
My Zero shuddered violently as I dove down into the cloud bank, the other planes trailing behind me. A few seconds later we were through the clouds. The ground came into focus. . . . Only it wasn"t ground at all, it was ocean. More specifically, the Pacific Ocean, and I was headed toward a little cigar-shaped gray thing in the water.
It only took a moment for my brain to get up to speed and adjust for scale. That little gray thing wasn"t so little after all. It was far away but getting closer. It was, in fact, a battleship. As I recalled from my old Battleship game, it took four direct hits to sink a battleship. As I recalled from my World War II history, countless American ships were brutally disabled by pilots of the "Divine Wind" making suicide runs, crashing their planes into battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and even aircraft carriers.
I knew enough from Quinn"s flight-simulator games to know that you pull back on the stick to make the plane go up, and so I grabbed both grips and pulled. The stick shuddered and resisted, as uncooperative as that stupid lap bar had been. The other planes buzzed behind me, and all at once I realized I was not just one of a dozen planes, I was the squadron leader. They were all following me to their doom.
Once more this place had tapped into my secret fears. Fear of flying, fear of falling, but even worse than that, the fear of taking everyone down with me.
The battleship swelled before me as I dove toward it. Now I could see sailors scrambling on the deck, manning their big guns, and firing in my direction.
They say when you"re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes, but that"s not quite right. It isn"t the flickering of life"s events that strikes you; instead, it"s the sudden realization of what your life has meant. Your whole life is captured in a single image that tells you who you"ve been. The image that came to me now were those stupid models hanging in my bedroom. The Zero, chased by a P-40, frozen in a pretend dogfight dive.
That was my life.
I hadn"t lived a real life-I"d had just a model of a life. Everything I did, everything I thought, was suspended safely by strings, too high up for anyone to damage. Zero contact, zero risk. Now those strings had been cut and I was going to die, never having had a chance to live without them.
A blast exploded to my right as the battleship"s guns tried to take me out. The shock wave rattled my plane. I could see the bridge of the battleship now. Crewmen inside were running for cover.